US TikTok ban linked to pro-Palestine content rather than China threat, insiders reveal
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Yeah, no shit? We all saw that, when the chants for bans started coming after the anti-genocide protests...
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Combining posting activity and views per posts yields us with this perspective of total views. Different rates of amplification mean that the already big differences in posting activity are magnified. So this is what happened. We can easily see how we get to TikTok, as an environment, having much more Pro-Palestinian content than Pro-Israel content. We can also see that for much of October 2023, General content was by far the most dominant. But these data alone cannot tell us why there were such meaningful differences in views per post. There is at least one thing we can rule out, however. This effect doesn’t appear to be tied to user engagement.
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Well when they say user engagement they seem to be talking about users taking actions to engage with content. But they say elsewhere that the TikTok algorithm doesn’t seem to respond to these actions in general, so it’s unsurprising that this is not the cause. Instead, it seems to optimize for viewing time which doesn’t seem to be part of the available data here, unfortunately.
However, if we start with a very pro-Palestinian user-base (as suggested by the initial post count) then it’s not surprising that these users would be more inclined to watch content that shares their political views and therefore the algorithm would boost these more popular videos to more people. So these numbers really don’t show anything unusual that I can identify.
Maybe that’s all you were saying initially but I was more wondering whether there is evidence that TikTok is boosting certain content above and beyond what is of interest to its users in an attempt to influence them. Given the lack of key data, this analysis cannot directly answer this question, but the patterns here strike me as fairly organic looking.
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However a lot of these algorithms are so complex that it’s not clear to me how easily they can be manipulated.
... Really? That's funny. It's not clear to us because we aren't professionals. It's one thing to question if they are, but they absolutely can. That has been proven many times over
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... The people that made the algorithms can't make changes to the algorithm?
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My guess was that it wasn't boosting Palestinian content but wasn't suppressing it like a lot of other American platforms and news outlets tended to do.
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There's no such thing as any cleanly delineated race or ethnicity, save for maybe some people who've been isolated on an island for a thousand years. But it is a natural response to the weaponized term "antisemitism" being used against defenders of Palestinians, to point out that both groups are described as "semitic".
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Yeah, I'm sure all the other countries that banned it also banned it for the same reason. Absolutely nothing to do with the Chinese commies trying to take over the world. /s
I'll believe it wasn't being "banned" because of China when Felon Musk removes his Tesla Swatstikar giga factory out of China. I have an easier time seeing this as a greed driven distraction run by the multi billion dollar disinformation campaign China has been putting on for decades.
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AOC made a video revealing some of the backroom talks they had during floor discussions. It’s 100% Palestine driven. The Chinese claims have zero proof and are just conjecture. Like the article says it wasn’t until the pro Palestine rhetoric starting increasing around October/November that this bill really started getting steam.
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It really doesn’t matter if the Chinese were pushing more Palestine content. News is news. Just like MAGAts want to live in an echo chamber on Faux News, others want to have a more liberal news source.
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I think that has more to do with what’s popular. When the Ukraine war first started TikTok had a ton of pro Ukraine content.
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It was obvious to everyone and their cat.
The internet is a massive US PSYOP for which it's going to fight with all its might to not lose control over.
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I'm a software developer and that's really not true. Theres an entire industry based on algorithm manipulation by people who never see the actual algorithm code - its called SEO.
Even the most complex algorithm that was sent from the future by aliens would be possible to manipulate given local control.
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By that logic, there's no such thing as "golden retriever" and "cocker spaniel" either, since both are canis familiaris.
Words mean things. Use them properly.
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I don’t think SEO is comparable to these content recommendation algorithms. Maybe it is easy and I’m wrong but everyone seems to just be speculating wildly at this point and it doesn’t seem too useful. How can we get to the bottom of what’s really happening in a way that can be verified with evidence.
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Nah man I run a couple of seo optimized technical blogs that are getting thousands of views every day mostly through SEO. Its a bit more simple today cause Google is just giving up as all you need domain authority, keywords, backlinks and good content to do well but without those you will never get front page, period.
There are also incredible amount of SEO utilities that drive content creation like keyword difficulty and trend following so it is very much the same algorithm manipulation but through prediction and reverse engineering.
I'd love for SEO to not be real and just make stuff but reality is SEO and even technical SEO (like semantic html) is required for any form of success in publishing content.
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Huh? I never said SEO isn’t real it’s just a totally different process from the one we’re discussing.
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Why not both?
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Its probably one of the factors, but its not like that was the sole reason.
trump already tried that in his first term, way before the gaza genocide. The goal is to force them to bend the knee and become a right wing propaganda machine. Suppressing info on israeli warcrimes is just an added bonus
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Most big bills have multiple factions profiting from it. But what pushed the TikTok ban over the bipartisan bill was definitely their stance of (non) censorship on Palestine.
What was also telling is that right after Trumps election TikTok was allowed to stay but it started banning the phrase "free Palestine"
